Year: 2007

Hi Folks, If you’ve been following the spatial forum over at MSDN, you’ve probably run across this thread. In short, we’ve ignited quite a controversy with the coordinate ordering for the well-known text and well-known binary we use for the geography type: we use latitude-longitude; many would prefer longitude-latitude. While I don’t buy into many of…

Hi Folks, Now that our initial spatial support has shipped, there has undestandably been an uptick in discission on the web. It seemed time for a bit of a link post. Besides this blog, the forum I’m most involved in is the Kamai Spatial forum on MSDN, and traffic there is certainly up. There are even…

Hi Folks, Last time we talked about a simple primary filter. (See previous installments: 1, 2.) We stopped short, however, of showing how this primary filter would actually make anything faster. Recall that our simple grid index defines a table-valued function (TVF) Grid() that maps spatial objects to a set of integers. Looking at our…

Hi Folks, Let’s continue with the discussion of spatial indexing form last time. If you already know a lot about spatial indexing these first few posts are going to be a lot of background—hopefully I don’t make too many mistakes. 🙂 We’re going to focus on Madison, WI, and try to answer a very simple…

Hi Folks, If you’ve seen one of my recent spatial talks, you’ve seen me walk through the basics of how our indexing works. I’m going to do roughly the same thing here over a series of blog posts, except that I’m (eventually) going to go into a few more details. We’ll start with some basics,…

I’m happy to say that our latest community technology preview (CTP), officially dubbed the “November CTP” for obvious reasons, has been released. You can get it here. This CTP has all of the spatial funcitonality we’ve been talking about: Planar “geometry” type Geodetic “geography” type An extensive collection of methods to go with each type Spatial…

I had a few technical problems with the webcast that pushed our start time back about five minutes, but after switching to a different machine things went fine. I’m now recorded and online here. I generally don’t like giving these webcasts, as I find the lack of a live audience somewhat disconcerting, but I think I’m starting…

I’ve been stalling, trying not to say too much about spatial until it’s actually available. The code has all been in for some time now, but its been waiting for its release vehicle: the next CTP. Hopefully it should be in your hands in a few weeks. Of course, if you’ve been following spatial closely,…

I got an interesting Connect item recently asking for a measurement type. (Yes, we do read these!) Essentially, the request was for a unit-aware value. From the request: When we need to store measurements types in a table, we are faced with a problem. The data is not only a number, but also a scale (kilo, mil, ton)…